Richard Scrushy, the born-again, guitar-playing chief executive who stood accused by federal prosecutors of orchestrating a $2.7 billion accounting sham at HealthSouth Corp., was acquitted yesterday of all 36 charges against him.

The stunning acquittal came after 20 days of jury deliberation and a trial that was as colorful outside the Birmingham, Ala., courthouse as it was inside.

Scrushy’s victory was achieved in the face of testimony from 15 separate former HealthSouth executives – including five former chief financial officers – who testified that Scrushy had been involved in a scheme to inflate profits.

Had he been convicted, he faced dozens of years in prison and forfeiture of about $280 million worth of assets.

Central to Scrushy’s defense was his legal team’s series of aggressive attacks against the prosecution’s parade of former finance executives. One of his lawyers, Arthur Leach, insisted that Scrushy was too rich to commit fraud. Other former finance officers were derided for their histories of alcoholism and marital infidelity or their decisions to cooperate with the government.

A veteran defense attorney specializing in securities law, Steven Smith of Bryan Cave LLP in Chicago, argued that the defense team’s greatest move was keeping Scrushy off the stand.

“Keeping him off the stand kept him from having to answer questions about the parade of CFOs who were implicating him,” he said.

Moreover, Scrushy not testifying allowed the jury to be skeptical of the prosecution’s witnesses.

“When you put the defendant on the stand,” Smith said, “the trial goes from being about the prosecution’s case to about the believability of the defendant.”

The depth of Scrushy’s connections in Birmingham – he was long the city’s premier philanthropist – also helped him, said Bryan Cave’s Smith. He hosted a morning Bible show on local TV and joined a prominent downtown African-American church around the beginning of the trial.

During the trial, Scrushy, who fancies himself quite the picker on guitar, had a local radio hit with “Honk If You Love to Honky-Tonk,” performed by his country-and-western band Dallas County Line.

Scrushy isn’t out of the woods yet, however, as he faces both an SEC civil suit and a class-action suit filed on behalf of aggrieved investors.